Intentional Electromagnetic Interference (IEMI) is a rising threat to the electronic systems that are used and depended upon in everyday life of civil society. To address this threat, it is important to develop an understanding of what IEMI is and how it can be used to disrupt sophisticated electronic systems. By understanding IEMI and its disruptive effects, predictive models and protection standard can be developed for various types of electronic systems to address the threat.
The focus of this thesis is to detail the experimental results involved when investigating the susceptibility of a single microcontroller instruction. A microcontroller represents a system on a chip and provides an ideal starting point for developing a predictive model for the upset effects that can be caused by an IEMI attack on a digital system. The microcontroller device used in the experiment is the ATMEL AT89LP2052, which is an 8051-core based microcontroller device that processes instructions in parallel. The experiment involves targeting specific moments within an instruction cycle, based on the parallel processing of the LP2052, to determine whether or not different actions within the cycle have different susceptibility levels to IEMI.